Mugs

“Let it all hang out” is a classic slogan of the countercultural 1960s. It dares you to be unfiltered and authentic. “Tuck it all back in” reminds us that the rest of us aren’t interested. “Let it all hang out” celebrates expos...

“Don’t mess with Texas” is an old threat — that suggests that Texas always has the option to secede and become its own country. “Cut Texas loose” calls that bluff. “Cut Texas loose” is a fantasy of severing ties—a blue-state da...

Go alone and you gain speed; go together and you gain endurance. The tension is choosing: do you want the quick win—or a journey that survives your bad days? “If you want to go fast, travel alone” flatters speed and autonomy: f...

White men built a slave empire, then bled to end it. One fact marks authorship of a crime; the other marks what it cost, late in the story, to finally stop it. “White men enslaved 10 million people in this country” names a vast...

This two-part proverb makes a profound point about the reality of the ruling class. We’re not simply subject to their good humor. We lose either way. This for the folks who are looking for relief by looking at the other side of...

So which is it? Am I supposed to seize the moment or to carefully bide my time, waiting for just the right opportunity? The real point is that it takes wisdom to tell the difference. Individually, these two proverbs each give u...

Both sides have a point, but the idea that the minimum wage is there to protect workers from exploitation is often forgotten. It needs to be brought back into the conversation. It makes intuitive sense that if we raise the mini...

The early bird bets on speed; the patient saint bets on timing. Some wins belong to those who pounce, others to those who endure long enough for the better thing to appear. “The early bird gets the worm” glorifies urgency: move...

Sometimes we have to recognize how close our deepest wisdom is to the edge of absurdity. And we also have to acknowledge genius when we see it, in this case, in the person of the incomparable Oscar Wilde. The incomparable Oscar...

Clothes signal who we are, yet we’re told not to trust appearances. There’s a paradox here: we rely on signals to read people while insisting those signals can’t be trusted. Instead seeing these two proverbs as contradictions, ...

“Don’t sweat the small stuff” tells you to protect your sanity; “the devil’s in the details” warns that neglecting the small stuff is how trouble gets in. Hint: it’s not all small stuff. “Don’t sweat the small stuff” is a copin...

America has long had a love-hate relationship with unions. The two sides of the debate are neatly captured by these two sayings. There’s a lot of controversy on this topic. But the facts are the facts. In some ways unions do ma...